core faculty

John Phan

John Phan

Associate Professor of Vietnamese Humanities

Office: 620 Kent Hall

Office Hours: Thursdays, 2-4pm

Phone: (212) 854-5744
Email: jp3720@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Saint Olaf College (’02)
MA: Columbia University (’05)
PhD: Cornell University (’12)

Classes Taught

ASCE UN1367 Introduction to East Asian Civilizations: Vietnam
AHUM UN1400 Colloquium on Major Texts: East Asia
EAAS 8630 Braided Languages: Diglossia and Cosmopolitanism in Premodern Vietnam
EAAS GU4412 History of Writing in a Cosmopolitan East Asia
EAAS UN3710 Fiction & Film in the Making of Modern Vietnams
HSEA GR6300 Vietnamese Studies: Historiography & Methodology

Research Interests

Language as an historical record, Language ethics through time, Translation, Vietnamese
Writing Systems and Vernacular Scripts, Historical Linguistics, Linguistic Contact
between China and Vietnam


John Phan is a language historian focused on the ways in which the history of spoken
language, literary language, and writing systems can reveal social, cultural and political
realities of the premodern and early modern worlds. His first book, entitled Lost Tongues
of the Red River: Annamese Middle Chinese & the Origins of the Vietnames Language,
focuses on the history of Sino-Vietic linguistic contact, and is forthcoming from Harvard
Asia Center Press. His second project focuses on the vernacularization of early modern
Vietnamese society, as exemplified by a vigorous practice of translation from Literary
Sinitic into vernacular Vietnamese over the 17th -18th centuries, amidst the sociopolitical
regionalization of that period. In addition to the nature of linguistic contact, and broad
issues in linguistic change and historical phonology as they pertain to broader historical
issues, he is keenly interested in the cultural and intellectual ramifications of multiple
languages coexisting in single East Asian societies, of linguistic pluralism in general, and
of the transformation of oral languages into written literary mediums in historically
diglossic cultures of East and Southeast Asia.

For a complete list of publications, please visit his personal website.

Selected Publications
“Sesquisyllabicity,  Chữ Nôm, and the Early Modern embrace of vernacular writing in Vietnam.” In Journal of Chinese Writing Systems, Online First advance version (2020), pp. 1-14.
“Vietnamese Lexicographic Practices in the 19th and 20th Centuries.” The Cambridge World History of Lexicography (2019). Edited by John Considine. Cambridge University Press, pp. 356-365.
“The 20th Century Secularization of the Sinograph in Vietnam, and its Demotion from the Cosmological to the Aesthetic,” Journal of World Literature (2016)

“Rebooting the Vernacular in 17th Century Vietnam,” in Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000-1919 (Brill, 2014)

“Chữ Nôm and the Taming of the South: A Bilingual Defense for Vernacular Writing in the Chỉ Nam Ngọc Âm Giải Nghĩa,” The Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2013)

Lien-Hang T. Nguyen

Lien-Hang T. Nguyen

Dorothy Borg Associate Professor in the History of the United States and East Asia, Director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute

Office: 926 IAB
Office Hours: R 1-2:30 pm and by appointment
Phone Number: (212) 854-0129
Email: ln2358@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: Yale University, 2008
BA: University of Pennsylvania, 1996

Classes Taught

The Vietnam War
The United States and East Asia
The Wars for Indochina
Southest Asia & the World

Research Interests

Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Dorothy Borg Associate Professor in the History of the United States and East Asia, specializes in the Vietnam War, U.S.-Southeast Asian relations, and the global Cold War. Professor Nguyen is currently working on a comprehensive history of the 1968 Tet Offensive for RandomHouse. She is the general editor of the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, 3 vols., as well as co-editor of the Cambridge Studies in U.S. Foreign Relations.

Selected Publications

Books

Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

Tet 1968: The Battles that Changed the Vietnam War and the Global Cold War (New York: Random House, forthcoming).

Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, 3 vols. (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Scholarly Articles

“Revolutionary Circuits: Toward Internationalizing America in the World,” Diplomatic History 39, Issue 3 (June 2015): 411-422.

“1968: Negotiating While Fighting or Just Fighting?” in Eds. Pierre Journoud and Cécile Menétrey-Monchau, Vietnam, 1968-1976: Exiting a War (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2011).

“The Vietnam Decade: The Global Shock of the War,” in Eds. Niall Ferguson, Charles Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel Sargent, Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

“Waging War on All Fronts: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Vietnam War, 1969-1972” in Eds. Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston, Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969-1977 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

“Cold War Contradictions: Toward an International History of the Second Indochina War, 1969-1973” in Eds. Mark Philip Bradley and Marilyn B. Young, Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Local, National and Transnational Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

“Sino-Vietnamese Split in the Post-Tet War in Indochina, 1968-1975” in Eds. Sophie Quinn-Judge and Odd Arne Westad, The Third Indochina War: Conflict between China, Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972-1979 (London: Routledge Press, 2006).

“Vietnamese Perceptions of the French-Indochina War” in Eds. Fredrik Logevall and Mark Lawrence, Indochina in the Balance: New Perspectives on the First Vietnam War.  (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

“The War Politburo: Vietnam’s Diplomatic and Political Road to the Tet Offensive,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, nos. 1-2 (February/August 2006).

David Max Moerman

moermanD. Max Moerman

Professor, Chair of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College

Office: 303 Milbank
Office Hours: T 4:30-5:30, W 1:00-2:00 and by appointment.
Phone: (212) 854-5540
Email: dm438@columbia.edu

Educational Background

AB: Columbia College (’86)
PhD: Stanford University (’99)

Classes Taught

AHUM UN1400 Colloquium on Major Texts: East Asia
RELI GU4611 The Lotus Sutra

Research Interests

East Asian Buddhism, Visual and Material Culture of Japanese Religions

D. Max Moerman is Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures. He is Co-Chair of the Columbia University Seminar in Buddhist Studies and an Associate Director of the Columbia Center for Buddhism and Asian Religions. He holds an A.B. from Columbia College and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. His research interests are in the visual and material culture of Japanese religions. His current book project, Geographies of the Imagination: Buddhism and the Japanese World Map, is under contract with the Harvard University Asia Center.

Selected Publications

“The Buddha and the Bathwater: Defilement and Enlightenment in the Arima Engi,”
Japanese Journal of Religious Studies (2015)

“Demonology and Eroticism: Islands of Women in the Japanese Buddhist Imagination,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies (2009)

Localizing Paradise: Kumano Pilgrimage and the Religious Landscape of Premodern Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2005)